Security Aspects of Digital Twins in IoT

The number of Internet-connected devices are expected to reach almost 30 billion by 2030, and already today the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is a part of everyday life in sectors like public health, smart cars, smart grids, smart cities, smart manufacturing and smart homes. An even tighter integration between IoT technology and physical objects within these sectors has been made possible by the Digital Twin (DT) technology providing better abilities for real-time monitoring, data-driven modeling and process optimization. One integral aspect of this approach is the connection between IoT end-devices and their corresponding digital twins for real-time data communication. Depending on the envisioned scenario, the involved data and derived processes affect the safety of human lives, hence an authentic connection is of major importance. At the same time, IoT devices have restrictions on the available power sources and provided computing resources. In this work we report on our ex periments with the Azure IoT Hub, the commercial platform that supports digital twins offered by Microsoft. First, we set up a real-time connection between the cloud platform and two different IoT devices and explore how an authentic connection is established between IoT devices and their corresponding DTs. Based on a test bed consisting of widely used IoT devices we analyse the power consumption and execution time of the offered authentication mechanisms that are based on general symmetric or asymmetric encryption. While the authentication time for a Raspberry Pi is below 0.5 seconds, the same task took above 4.5 seconds for an Arduino, highlighting the importance of lightweight authentication mechanisms for real-time communication between IoT devices and DT platforms.